Page:The Smart Set (Volume 1).djvu/125

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HOU art a golden iris
 * Under a purple wall,

Whereon the burning sunlight
 * And greening shadows fall.

What Summer night's enchantment
 * Took up the garden mould,

And with the falling star-dust
 * Refined it to such gold?

What wonder of white magic,
 * Bidding thy soul aspire,

Filled that luxurious body
 * With languor and with fire?

Wert thou not once a beauty
 * In Persia or Japan,

For whom, by toiling seaway
 * Or dusty caravan,

Of old some lordly lover
 * Brought countless treasure home,

Of gems and silk and attar,
 * To pleasure thee therefrom?

Pale amber from the Baltic,
 * Soft rugs of Indian ply,

Stuffs from the looms of Bagdad
 * Stained with the Tyrian dye.

Were thy hands bright with henna,
 * Thy lashes black with kohl,

Thy voice like silver water
 * Out of an earthen bowl?

Or was thy only tent-cloth
 * The blue Astartean night,

Thy soul to beauty given,
 * Thy body to delight?

Wert thou not well desired,
 * And was not life a boon,

When Tanis held in Sidon
 * Her Mysteries of the Moon?

There in her groves of ilex
 * The nightingales made ring

With the mad lyric chorus
 * Of youth and love and Spring,